Sunday, March 27, 2011

In an email reponse to questions from The NYTPicker, former NYT economics writer Peter S. Goodman has questioned NYT executive editor Bill Keller's motives in mangling a quote from a recent column in the Huffington Post.

In today's NYT Magazine, Keller writes about the need for accuracy in news coverage -- but in doing so the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist innacurately quoted from a February 10 HuffPo column by Goodman.

Halfway through the column, Keller defends the NYT newsroom staff against an attack on the paper's approach to impartiality, by an unidentified critic:

My little realm, the newsroom, consists of about 1,100 people. Every one of them has opinions about a lot of things. But just as doctors and lawyers, teachers and military officers, judges and the police are expected to set aside their own politics in the performance of their duties, so are our employees. This does not mean — as one writer recently scoffed — that we “poll people at both extremes of any issue, then paint a line down the middle and point to it as reality.”

But in his haste to make a point, Keller managed to misinterpret the meaning of the quote from Goodman, who left the paper in September to join HuffPo as its business and technology editor.

Goodman's point wasn't presented either as a criticism of the NYT, or in the form of a scoff. In fact, he represents the notion quoted by Keller as a "false idea" of journalism, and nowhere does he mention the NYT. Here is the full context of Goodman's comment:

In the sort of journalism I am interested in practicing here, I want my reporters to reject the false idea that you simply poll people at both extremes of any issue, then paint a line down the middle and point to it as reality.

We emailed Goodman last night for his reaction to Keller's misrepresentation of his point. Here is the full text of his reply:

I greatly respect Bill and I still love the Times, and I'm not sure why he construed my sentence as a "scoff." I don't get why he apparently took it as being about the Times, when I was speaking much more generally about a troubling default mode in contemporary journalism. I was simply saying that I think it's crucial that journalists report impartially, insofar as we start our inquiry without being beholden to any particular interest, but equally that we then write it as we see it, without fretting over how readers will see us. I was in particular criticizing the tendency in many publications to insert mentions of bogus contentions as a means of inoculating themselves against claims that they are staking out a clear position. That doesn't help readers decide anything for themselves. It's phony centrism masquerading as impartiality. At the HuffPost, I don't allow my reporters to start out trying to buttress an ideological position, but if the reporting winds up going there, I see no value in muddying it up with dubious pseudo-facts aimed at creating a false sense of balance.

What makes Keller's misrepresentation notable is his ongoing battle with Arianna Huffington that began with his last NYT Magazine column. In that piece, Keller took strong issue with aggregation as a media business model, and his broadside against Huffington led to a brief skirmish between the two media titans.

Curiously, Keller appeared to be ignoring his own commentary about journalism and impartiality in his misquotation of Goodman's column in the Huffington Post.

"Once you proclaim an opinion," Keller wrote in today's column, "you may feel an urge to defend it, and that creates a temptation to overlook inconvenient facts when you should be searching them out."

Perhaps that explains why Keller overlooked the "inconvenient facts" of what Goodman actually wrote before making his point today.

10 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Give Keller a break, like many at The Times he's an overworked stress ball who probably just made an honest mistake on deadline. If anything, Keller should think about giving up his column - he may have taken on more than he can chew.

This is so typical of someone in charge of a dieing brand. The last straw is this "paywall" thing. This is just another case of old school's inability to adjust to new school in their world. Take note, why would someone leave NYT to go to Huff? Maybe because it's a better staffed and better written paper/blog. Change hurts the arrogant and aloof. #Thatisall!

Lessee, Goodman leaves NYT and makes a comment about journalism in general - which happens to include the NYT - and the comment cannot be characterized as positive.

Sounds like a scoff directed at NYT to me. He didn't exactly exempt his most recent employer when he made the comment. He could have, and should have if he wasn't talking about NYT but he didn't.

It's like someone coming out of a movie and immediately trashing Hollywood right outside the theater. You can't really ignore the first fact and assume he wasn't commenting about the movie he just saw but only Hollywood in general.

Goodman left an impression he intended to leave. He can't blame others for not reading his mind.

It should be, a recently departing writer said, coughingly, "now I'm at Huffington's there are no limits to what you can pay me to pass as verifiable truth",

OR

a writer hoping to carve out space to echo his more passive aggressive bus at the NYT-OPED, said, coughing out loud, "slip me a cash-filled briefcase and I'll make the new lady boss hot and heavy for Romney."

Folks don't go to HuffPo to read, they go hoping to catch a glimpse of LiLo's camel toe. And that's how it should be, lest a bunch of irrational dense nobodies start claiming to feel so important as to possess corporeal rights! Whatever, keep it unreal.

Pino, why would someone leave NYT for HuffPo? Because there you can say whatever, and there is no editor to call you out. You can accept junkets on the side, evade the IRS with no effects, be a co**tease, a co**sucker, a mofo, or pimp out your own kid g-forbid, and no one will mind.

You can directly speak to a select few, and call that 'the reader' and it won't bother some bland uptight boss who asks for fact-checking. That'll also take the pressure off the pickles at NYT.

Is it a scoff at journalistic standards, or is it more, like 'I'm outa here suckers type thingie? Hmmm. Goodman's reply, suggests that he's saying he starting out neither right nor left with truth (redundantly qualified as verifiable) as his master. That's his default mode. Then he might skew to one side or another depending on what pays.

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